Sales Management Consulting – 3 Ideas to boost sales

Sales Management Consulting

Sales Management Consulting has the potential to take your business to the next level, by helping you work on the business instead of in the business. With buyers better educated than ever before, increased competition and increases in sales targets, coupled with reductions in resources, managing a Sales Force has never been more challenging. Whilst this form of consulting can cover many areas and topics, here are three ideas to help you get started.

1) STRATEGY

If you like the sound of increasing sales, Sales Management Consulting will help you make the Commitment to get the increase in performance and hence sales that you are looking for. For example:

You will need to be committed enough to take part in the initial Sales Team Training sessions yourself, this is leading by example, and shows your team that you are serious about any training program. If you don’t take part, chances are your sales people will recognize it is not that important to you, which subliminally tells them it shouldn’t be that important to them.

You will need to be committed enough to look at changing the way your sales people work. Focusing on quality appointments for example, not quantity. Being busy and being effective are not the same thing and the top sales people know this. You might need to start recording Key Performance Indicators or start recording different ones.

You will need to be committed to continued development coaching after the training, to ensure the training is not an event but a real learning journey for your team. “Companies that offer training alone experience a 22.4% increase in productivity, but when combined with coaching that rises to 88%”Public Personnel Management.

You will need to be committed enough, to jump on, in public if necessary, any saboteurs who try to derail any changes you make. People do not like change and some sales people may try their best to resist change.

2) STRUCTURE

For a short time until you get some quick wins effective Sales Management Consulting will help you to prioritize Sales over EVERYTHING else in your business. This means everyday having a ruthless focus on achieving sales goals. Not financial sales goals, behavioral sales goals. Focus on Sales Activity by increasing the quality and then, and only then, increase the quantity.

Does the biggest opportunity lie in coaching and training the top performing 20% of your sales team? Probably not. If these people are already hitting their sales targets, then leave them for now.

Does the biggest opportunity lie in coaching the bottom 20% of your sales team? Probably not. The biggest mistake managers make, is holding on to under performers longer than is necessary. Now there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, because if the company hired these people, the company needs to take some responsibility for them. Generally speaking however the bottom 20% of sales performers are not the best place to spend your Learning and Development

The biggest opportunity you have, is moving the 60% average sales people towards the top 20%. A mere 1% increase in sales performance, multiplied by 60% of your sales team, can be huge in terms of revenue. Typically these people are more interested, more motivated and willing to learn than any of the other groups. Here is where you need to FOCUS.

3) PEOPLE

Sales Management Consulting helps CEO’s understand a well drilled high performing sales force will easily outsell your competition but not with a Manager – they need a leader. Will your sales team go “over the top” and follow their Sales Manager? Is your sales Manager leading from the front and by example? Does your sales manager catch the team when they are doing something wrong or catch them when they are doing something right?

Managers are more instrumental in the success of any new Sales Team Training than the actual trainer. A Sales Manager has a Sales Team 40 hours a week. A Sales Coach or a Sales Trainer may only have the team for 1 hour per week. Without a strong manager to reinforce what is taught in class, your Sales Team will more than likely just drift back to the unproductive behaviors that caused you to start a training program in the first place.

Managers need coaching & training too, as top sales performers do not always become a top sales manager naturally. The skill set required to effectively Manage sales people is very different to that of a top sales performer.

Sales Management Consulting may take your business to the next level, however making sure you start off on the right path will make all the difference. In our experience the single biggest reason clients engage with Sales Management Consultants is simply because the CEO or VP of Sales does not have enough time to do the things they need to do. Having an external resource they can call on as and when they need them then becomes invaluable.